PROSOPOGRAPHY
RESEARCH

Modern History Research Unit, University of Oxford

PROSOPOGRAPHY: DEFINITION

Prosopography has been defined as an independent science of social
history embracing genealogy, onomastics and demography. Karl Ferdinand
Werner (‘L’apport de la prosopographie à l’histoire
sociale des élites’, in Keats-Rohan ed. Family Trees,
Woodbridge, 1997), traces the origins of the concept to the 16th century,
when it was closely associated with the idea of collective, but individual,
biography. Claude Nicolet defined its aim as the history of groups as
elements in political and social history, achieved by isolating series
of persons having certain political or social characteristics in common
and then analyzing each series in terms of multiple criteria, in order
both to obtain information specific to individuals and to identify the
constants and the variables among the data for whole groups. As Werner
has written elsewhere, prosopography permits the political history of
men and
‘events’ to be combined with the hidden social history of
long-term evolutionary processes. Much of this hidden history is revealed
by identifying the public offices held by prosopographical subjects,
and hence prosopography is also directly concerned with the history of
institutions. He says that, in short, prosopographical analysis concerns
itself with the person, his environment and his social status, that is,
a person within the context of family and other social groups, the place
or places in which he was active and the function he performed within
his society. Perhaps the most significant of Werner’s towering
achievements in this field has been his demonstration that attempts at
understanding the European past are fatally undermined by the strictly
chronological -Antiquity - High, Central and Low Middle Ages, etc, or
the strictly regional, or worse, nationalistic, - ‘Romans’ v. ‘German’,
‘French’ v. ‘German’, - approach, made worse
by the modern tendency to think in terms of race and racial or ‘ethnic’ identity.
Prosopography does not seek nations avant la lettre, but examines
the whole of a past society, its structure and the individuals who made
it up, in order to trace the evolution of the social and cultural perception
of nationhood embraced by persons lived within defined regions, perhaps
separated from others by language and law and perhaps not, but whose
chief claim to distinctiveness reposed in the recognition of the legitimacy
of their ruler, who was not necessarily born in the region and who usually
married outside it.